Mexican Navy Tall Ship Dismasted After Striking Brooklyn Bridge

By Daniel Katzive (gCaptain) –

The Mexican Navy training ship Cuautemoc collided with the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday evening, resulting in damage to the ship’s masts and multiple injuries.

The New York Post is reporting that 200 people were aboard the ship at the time of the accident. Injured people are being brought to Brooklyn Navy Yard for evaluation, according to the Post.

Video posted on social media shows the masts making contact with the bridge and falling.

The tall ship, launched in 1982, arrived in New York Harbor on Tuesday of this week for a visit and has been docked at South Street Seaport’s Pier 17.

The vessel had just departed the South Street Seaport with the tug Charles D McAllister escorting when the accident occurred.

The Cuautemoc is now up river from the Brooklyn Bridge with its AIS status as “stopped.”

The FDNY released the following statement:

At approximately 8:20 Saturday night, the FDNY received a call that a boat struck the Brooklyn Bridge. There were 277 people on the boat. 27 people were removed for treatment.

“Originally, we had a Brooklyn box out for folks in the water, for a boat in distress,” said Chief of Training Michael Meyers. “Once the marine units arrived on scene, we knew, initially, we knew immediately that we had a serious incident with a boat striking the bridge, so we had reports of people in the water. At that point coming down the FDR, we decided to have a dual command post, both on the Brooklyn side and the Manhattan side. Our marine units got out there, picked up Rescue 2 and Rescue 4 and brought them out to the vessel. They started to remove and treat the aided. They also brought EMS units out to the vessel to start to treat the more seriously injured people on that vessel. They brought them all here to Pier 16, where we set up a casualty collection point and an EMS staging area to assess the victims and send the most serious to the hospital right away. The police, fire and EMS did a tremendous job of working together to get everyone off of that ship safe.”